Prayer can be a very confusing thing—but it doesn’t have to be! As we go through the different sections in the Bible, I will be introducing the kids to how to interact with and trust God based on what we have learned. This first lesson will revolve around the Parable of the King Who Listened and it will teach kids about the access they have to God.
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Hi! I’m Miss Tyler and welcome to another episode of Context for Kids where I teach you guys stuff most adults don’t even know. If this is your first time hearing and you missed the last seven episodes about the Creation story, you can find those archived at contextforkids.podbean.com, which has the old episodes downloadable, or at contextforkids.com, where I have transcripts for readers or on my Context for Kids YouTube channel.
People are always talking about prayer like everyone knows what it is and everyone does it and like it is so totally easy. But I am going to tell you a secret—most people really don’t know much about prayer beyond praying the Lord’s prayer. But prayer is this amazing thing that I want you to know about and have in your life, without all the mystery and confusion. As we will see as we keep going through the Bible, God made us to be able to communicate with Him and to do the work of His Kingdom. And prayer is a huge part of that but it is something that people rarely do. For some reason, most people who believe in God don’t really spend much time paying but I don’t want you to make that mistake. I am going to tell you a story:
Once upon a time, there were two children who lived in a huge Kingdom. It was an amazing place, filled with beautiful things but the very best thing about this kingdom was the king himself. He was kind, wise, good, generous, and always truthful. He was never unfair to people or cruel. And these children, we’ll call them Bo and Betty, knew the king personally. In fact, they even had a key to his castle and could walk right into the throne room any time they wanted and talk to him about stuff. And the king was always glad to see them and made time for them. He listened closely to everything they said whenever they came to see him. Sometimes he was able to do things for them right away and sometimes he waited until later. Sometimes he knew that doing what they wanted was not a good idea and so he said no. Sometimes they wanted things that he knew would be better for them to earn themselves rather than it just be given. He was very careful with their requests because he didn’t want them to become spoiled or prideful or wicked. Sometimes, when they got into trouble, he made sure not to save them from their consequences because he loved them and wanted them to learn from their mistakes. The king didn’t always give them what they wanted but he always listened and he always took them seriously and always thought carefully about what they were saying. I know you are thinking that they must be the luckiest kids in the whole world!
The problem was, they almost never came to see him unless they needed something. And sometimes they didn’t even visit him when they needed something. The king could look out his window to their home and their neighborhood and he watched as good things happened to them, and bad things. He watched when they won games and when their pet dog died. He watched as they struggled with long division and with spelling really long words. He saw when their best friend moved away and they cried and he saw when they were kind to the new boy down the street. And sometimes, very rarely, they would tell him about it if they needed help.
It made the king sad, because they only seemed to care about him when they wanted something or were in trouble. Otherwise, they ignored him. And he saw when they were sad and struggling and wished they would come tell him about it so that he could comfort them. He also noticed when they were celebrating something and wished they would talk to him about that too. He made sure they had food on the table and wished they would stop by to thank him for it. The king didn’t want to be just a vending machine whenever they wanted something and he didn’t want to be one of the tv channels they watched and then clicked away from when they got bored. He wanted to be a part of everything in their lives because he knew that if they shared it all with him that they would be happier and he could talk to them about everything and help them out with their lives every day and not just when they wanted something from him.
As the children grew up, they got angry about the things that the king refused to give them and fix for them and about the bad things that they thought he let happen. Because they didn’t share the good times with him and didn’t allow him to be a part of their sadness, they didn’t remember how wonderful he was. They forgot about him because they never really knew him. And the king was very sad because if they had just visited every day, they would have known him very well. Of course, the king was good and he never forgot them and every day he looked out the window of his castle in the hopes of seeing them come to visit.
Do you know what a parable is? A parable is a story with a deeper meaning. Jesus told ones that really had to be explained but I tell obvious parables. Obviously, I am telling you a story about how God is like a king and how praying to Him is like visiting Him. And how it is important that we visit with Him all the time about everything that is going on in our lives because He cares. Now, in the story I said that the children had a key that unlocks the king’s castle and in real life that key is Jesus. When we know Jesus and when we trust that He is who He says He is, God’s creative word and Messiah, and that He really did come to earth as a human being and work miracles and heal people and feed five thousand people with just five little loaves of bread and two small fishes, and when we believe that he was wrongly accused and that he was sentenced to death and that he was raised from the dead three days later, and that now He is King over all the earth and coming back someday—well, when we agree with that and when we tell everyone that he is our King and when we are loyal to Him and we do what He says—that is our key to the castle. Faith in Jesus makes it possible for us to always come and talk to God and for Him to always hear us.
Just think about it. The God who created everything hears you whenever you visit with Him in prayer. The God who split the Sea in half and allowed his people to walk across on dry ground—he hears you when you talk to Him. The mighty, all-powerful, loving, Creator God is paying attention to you and actually wanted to hear all about your day. Can you even imagine that? I think we would all be a lot more confident and a lot less scared, in general, if we really believed that God is always paying attention to us and listening when we talk to Him.
And that’s what prayer is—it’s talking to God. Sometimes people like to make it fancier than that, but really that’s what it is. When we pray we aren’t talking to ourselves or to thin air or to an imaginary friend but to God. And He hears us. He’s listening. Some people want to use flowery and fancy words that they don’t use when they normally talk, but you know what? God doesn’t need all that. Sometimes we are concentrating so much on how we sound and trying to sound fancy that we think more about the words we are using than about what we want to say to God. But God knows how we talk in real life and he isn’t fooled. Prayer isn’t a competition to see who sounds the coolest when they do it. Prayer is about having an honest relationship with God, a real relationship between the real you and the real Him. Imagine trying to fool God, right? But we do try to do that a lot. When we get to the story of Cain and Abel, you will see Cain trying to fool God and even though we read that and we facepalm, we do the same thing—just in other ways. One of those ways is by trying to be someone when we pray who we really aren’t in real life. But He watches us all day. He knows who we are. That’s who needs to come to Him in prayer, not the fake person.
Now, if you just don’t know how to talk with God, there are two prayers in Scripture that you can pray instead. And I pray these three times a day. I have a little alarm set on my watch and it goes off at 9am, 12am and 3pm. I pray at those times because that’s when they prayed at the Temple and today all around the world people pray at those hours, so when I pray then I am never praying alone. The first prayer is a prayer that Jesus taught His disciples when they wanted to know how to pray and the second prayer is found in Deuteronomy and is called the Shema. Jesus taught this prayer as well, and added another verse to it from Leviticus 19:18.
The first prayer is called the Lord’s Prayer because Jesus taught it in Matt 6:
9 Pray then like this: “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. 10 Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. 11 Give us this day our daily bread, 12 and forgive us our sins, as we also have forgiven the people who have sinned against us. 13 And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”
This is a wonderful prayer—of course, Jesus would teach us the most perfect prayer of all! This prayer tells God that we want His Name to be holy and set apart so that people will respect and love and honor Him. We also tell God that we want things here on earth to be done His way. We ask Him to feed us today. We ask Him to forgive us for the wrong things we do, and we promise to forgive others when they hurt us. But of course, that never means letting people who are older than you hurt you. And we ask Him not to let us be tempted to do wrong and for Him to give us a way out when we want to be bad, so that we will want to be good even more.
There is another prayer that I pray that is even older. It comes from Deuteronomy chapter 6 and Leviticus 19:18 and it goes like this: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your mind and with all your soul and with all your strength. And you shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
Jesus said that these are the two most important commandments in all the Bible. I pray them after the Lord’s Prayer every time so that I remember to focus on what is important. And because I pray these, I want them to be true more and more and God changes me on the inside.
But I also talk to God all day about things, the way I would to a real person. When I am happy, I share it with Him, and when I am sad or scared, I tell him all about it. When I am confused or angry I go to Him and talk to Him. When I am really angry at someone, I usually have to talk to Him about it until I am ready to forgive them and not take revenge on them. Because, when we don’t forgive, that’s usually what we end up doing. We take matters into our own hands and usually make everything ten times worse. When I forget to talk to God or when I am so angry that I don’t want to, my chances of thinking, doing, and saying the wrong things really increases a lot! Even though I am fifty-one years old and old enough to be a grandma, doesn’t mean that I don’t have to talk to God all the time and listen for Him to talk to me. We never get old enough to stop needing to listen to God’s voice and to hear His advice.
I want you guys to think about how crazy it would be if you knew a king that you could take your problems to and you just refused. Nope. Not going to talk to the person who can solve my problems or help me solve them. Not going to talk to the one person who gives the absolute best advice and who is always right. I will just handle it myself instead. How crazy is that, guys??? If you knew someone who knew the President of your country and was friends with them and when they got into trouble didn’t ask the President for help you just wouldn’t hardly believe it. And yet, we have the Creator and King of the entire universe listening to us and waiting anxiously for a visit and we don’t want to talk to him? We should be talking to Him, and listening for His voice, all the time.
Listening for His voice? You betcha. And I find that kids can hear God a lot more easily than grownups can. The problem is that we usually don’t want to hear what God has to say and especially when we really want to be right about stuff. But we’ll talk about that some other time.
For now, I want you to think about what we just studied over the past six weeks—the Creation story. After we study about Adam and Eve, we will talk about repentance prayers—admitting to God when we have sinned and asking Him for forgiveness—which is exactly what they refused to do. But right now, I want to get you thinking about something important. I want you to think about who you are praying to when you pray. It’s easy to just pray and think about nothing and kinda consider it a chore or just something you have to do. But if you pick up a rock or a leaf or a ladybug lands on your hand, it’s pretty cool. But you can’t make a rock or a leaf or a ladybug and neither can your parents. Neither can I. No person can. We wouldn’t even know where to begin even if we had the power or were smart enough. Do you remember from episode 2 where we talked about God’s creative word, Jesus, and the Hebrew word bara? Bara is a verb, an action word, that only applies to God. Only God can bara—create something out of nothing. Humans can make things out of other things, to a point, but we can’t create anything out of nowhere—except trouble!
When you are talking to God and taking your troubles to Him, I want you to understand what He can do. Jesus showed us just some of what God is capable of. And it is important to study the life of Jesus to remind ourselves of what God would do for people if He was still here with us on earth walking around as a human being. But the whole Bible is filled with amazing things that God has done and when we pray, we need to be thinking of those. When you pray to God you are talking to the one who made the entire universe and all the animals and plants. And remember, He made them to be just what we needed, so we know He cares and is interested in what we need. When you pray to God, you are talking to the one who protected people from sinning against Him by making them all speak different languages from one another. So you can know that sometimes when we think something bad is happening to us, it is to keep us from the wrong path and that God will do whatever it takes to help us, even if we don’t like it. When you pray to God, you are talking to the one who parted the Red Sea so that His people could escape from Pharaoh and His armies, so you can know that He is there when we need saving. When you pray to God, you are talking to the one who talked to Cain when he was angry enough at his brother to kill him, so you know that He cares enough about you to try and step in before you do something really bad. And He also talked to Cain after he killed his brother, so you know you are talking to someone who won’t just ignore you and hate you forever when you sin—even such a terrible sin as murder. When you pray to God, you are talking to the one whom Abraham and Sarah and Noah and Hannah and David and everyone in the Bible talked to. Just think of that—He talked with all those great heroes and He talks to you too. It’s like if you had a friend who knows a movie star and he talks to that movie star on the phone and talks to you too. You would probably be excited about that and ask all sorts of questions about his friend the movie star. Well, you should be even more excited that you can talk, all the time, everyday, with the one who talked face to face with Moses!
I keep telling you how special you are to God and His plans for His Kingdom and I mean it. And it all starts with faith in Jesus and accepting Him as your King and Savior but it doesn’t end there. We have to make God an everyday part of our lives if we want to be like Jesus—if we want to be faithful images of God and not someone who looks like a cracked or funhouse mirror reflection of God that doesn’t look anything like Him at all. I had a dream once where Jesus told me something amazing about you kids. All the grownups were excited and going off in their cars to meet Jesus but He told me that He wouldn’t be there when they were expecting Him. He would be late. You want to know why He would be late? Because He was sticking around for you guys. You are going to be grownups and you are going to serve God in His Kingdom and you are going to be a greater generation than mine. I know it with all my heart. You are going to do important things for God. You are going to take the Gospel to the ends of the earth and do good works, and your kids after you. And you may wonder how in the world little old you can do that. Well, you can’t. Not right now. But someday you will and it can start today by talking to God about anything and everything and listening because, sooner or later and maybe already, He will start talking to you. But like any friendship, you won’t hear the voice of anyone that you aren’t spending time with. You can spend time with Him alone, or with others. You can pray alone, or with others, and really it is good to do both. Treat God like your best friend, the first one you tell everything to. Talk to him, not in fancy language that you would have to think too hard about making sound right, but like Moses did. You can read the book of Exodus and Numbers and see the kinds of things Moses talked to God about and how He said them. He used normal words and spoke his mind.
And if you are embarrassed, don’t be. God already knows what you are thinking and what you have done so you won’t surprise Him. You can even tell Him when you are angry at Him or disappointed. It’s okay. The prophets in the Bible did that a lot and He never shot a lightning bolt at their butts. You can trust God because He already knows everything about you and hasn’t killed you yet! In fact, as we go through the Bible you might be surprised at how merciful He is when people have done bad things. Even when they aren’t sorry. That’s why I am doing this radio show, so you can learn all about God and about His Son Jesus. Like I always say, the whole Bible tells us about them even when it seems to be talking about humans. It’s always about God, telling us what He wants from us and why we can trust Him—even when we’ve just totally messed up. God isn’t like anyone we have ever met because He is perfect. Moms and dads and teachers and friends aren’t perfect. We mess up. We say and do the wrong things, make bad choices sometimes, and sometimes we get cranky and mean. You can always depend on God to be perfect and do the right thing, which is why you can talk to Him about anything in your life. Since you can’t hide anything from Him, you might as well talk to Him about it, right?
That’s it for this week and next week we will start talking about Adam and Eve. We’re going to talk about God’s special Garden, and Adam being made from dust, and the two trees and the naming of the animals and Eve being made, and the serpent and all of that. It’s going to take about two months to talk about it all, probably, because each part of the story tells us something important about God and why He deserves all of our trust, loyalty, and worship.
I love you. I am praying for you. I pray you have a wonderful week studying the Bible with the people who love you.